Chapter 1
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The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Introduce the chapter with an observation that the METR.org studies show that AI is doubling in capabilities every 7 months
when we measure the probability that a LLM and agents will get a task of a specific length correct.
AI can be the instructional designer's greatest tool, but we MUST include knowledge of how
students learn to be effective at generating intelligent textbooks.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Chapter 2 - MicroSims
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/01-prerequisite-analysis-microsim-fundamentals/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Chapter 3
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/03-microsim-pattern-library/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
For each Microsim Visualization Paradigm, you may cite examples of this type from this file: /Users/dan/Documents/ws/search-microsims/docs/search/microsims-data.json. You may also create a #### Diagram/
Chapter 4
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/04-visualization-libraries-tools/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Use the microsim generator skill located here for references of working microsim-generation skills
/Users/dan/Documents/ws/claude-skills/skills/microsim-generator
Note that the resources directory has the detailed rules for each MicroSim type:
microsim-generator/references $ ls bubble-guide.md p5-guide.md causal-loop-guide.md plotly-guide.md celebration-guide.md routing-criteria.md chartjs-guide.md timeline-guide.md comparison-table-guide.md venn-guide.md map-guide.md vis-network-guide.md mermaid-guide.md
Note that these skills are tuned to place the visualizations within a narrow iframe within a textbook, however MicroSims can also use parameters such as the Quiz Mode "quiz-mode=true" to enable a quiz mode within a microsim and an Editor Mode "editor-mode=true" to allow the MicroSim designer to move node elements around on a graph.
Note that MicroSim modularity (separate files for index.md, main.html, style.css, data.json, script.js) makes these MicroSims easier to maintain and extend.
Also note that extending MircoSims to track user events using the xAPI protocols will be covered in a later chapter.
Chapter 5
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/05-writing-microsim-specifications/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Begin with a compelling statement that Specification-Driven Design (SDD) is a powerful design process that focuses on teaching instructional designers to write crystal-clear high-quality specifications for each MicroSim. The key is to focus on WHAT the microsim should do, but leave it up to the LLMs to decide HOW to implement the MicroSim. Create several full examples of MicroSim specification files and describe how they avoided ambiguity of the design and also used specific language to make clear how the MicroSim should behave.
Chapter 6
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/06-adapting-audience-levels/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Mention that MicroSim can be used in books from Kindergarten to graduate school. Mention that the book "Reading for Kindergarten" https://dmccreary.github.io/reading-for-kindergarten/ already has a detail framework of MicroSims that focus on young readers. Get some sample here: https://github.com/dmccreary/reading-for-kindergarten/blob/main/docs/sims/index.md. Note the focus on colorful celebration animations so kids have fun!
On the other extreme, we have MicroSims that have been used at the college and graduate school level. Here are some samples of the Signal Processing course: https://github.com/dmccreary/signal-processing/blob/main/docs/sims/index.md
This shows that the same concepts apply to all levels of instructional design.
Chapter 7
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The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Chapter 8
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/08-anticipating-misconceptions/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Chapter 9
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/09-generating-microsims-ai-tools/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Put a special emphasis on the the use of Claude Code Skill as the strategies that Claude Code Skills use for intelligently putting the right content into the context window. Describe how Claude limits users to 30 skills and only puts a short 100-token summary of skills into a context window. Go into depth about creating rules that make your MicroSims consistent across an entire textbook or group of textbooks. Describe strategies for putting rules in global enterprise rule repositories, business unit repositories, department repositories, project repositories and personal project rules. Describe how conflicting rules can be resolved similar to the way that the "!important" rule in CSS can be resolved. Discuss the pros and cons of having many hierarchies of rules compared to one or two repositories of rules.
Chapter 10
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The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Put a focus on creating a completeness quality score rubric so that LLMs can check of all the required components for a MicroSim are in place. Note that a completeness quality score does not cover the usability of the MicroSim.
Go through the standardization process step-by-step: /Users/danmccreary/Documents/ws/claude-skills/skills/microsim-utils/references/standarization.md and not how the completeness score is calculated. Not that some MicroSims such as those written in p5.js have an additional metric such as is the link for "Edit in the p5.js Editor" present in the index.md file. Other MicroSim types do not have this metric.
For the section on the metadata, use the MicroSim JSON Schema here: /Users/danmccreary/Documents/ws/microsims/src/microsim-schema/microsim-schema.json Note that every microsim directory should contain a metadata.json file. There is a VERY important quote: "You can't reuse what you can't find." If all microsims have detailed metadata.json file then search tools like https://dmccreary.github.io/search-microsims/ can quickly narrow down a database of MicroSims by a facet such as subject, grade-level or JavaScript library. AI agents in the future will be able to find similar MicroSims and use these as the basis for new designs. Note that most generative AI systems are very precise at following the rules within an JSON Schema. Discuss the idea of having a quality score for each metadata.json file, including how popular a MicroSim is and if studies have shown it is effective at helping students learn.
Chapter 11
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The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
I have added some additional concepts to this chapter that need to be addressed. When we test MicroSims, we usually test them in two ways.
- As a "standalone" exercise done in addition to a class lecture where the teacher shows a MicroSim and the class tries it out on their computer.
- As part of an interactive intelligent textbook.
One key thing to know - learning is a non-linear process. In an interactive textbook students "chose their own adventure" and can hop around in any order driven by their curiosity.
We can use tools like Google Analytics to see what web pages students visit and when. However, to be effective at good A/B testing we want much more fine-grain tracking. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics don't make it easy to track how long a student spent on a MicroSim and what controls they changed. That is the fundamental difference between page-view tracking and simulation tracking.
Fortunately, there is an excellent standard for tracking the entire "experience" that each student has on any MicroSim or intelligent textbook. That is the "Experience Application Programming Interface" or just xAPI for short. The xAPI is both conceptually simple and yet it can be complex. At the simplest level, the xAPI is responsible for tracking who did what and when. What student clicked what buttons on a MicroSim and the date and time they did this.
xAPI events are the "fine grain" solution that we need to do A/B testing on our MicroSims.
xAPI events are typically sent to a device called an "Learning Record Store" or LRS. A LRS can take many forms. A LRS might be data store running in your browser (local storage) or it might be a server running in the cloud. Obviously, this data contains information about the student actions (the who) and therefore the security of the LRS is highly regulated. We will not go into all the security details, except to say that hyper-personalization of each students recommendations requires lots of data. The cost for gathering this data and storing it are non-trivial. We discuss this in depth in another intelligent book Graph LMS.
Both xAPI and the LRS standards are part of the IEEE learning standards process which include other standards that are part of the Total Learning Architecture. Details are covered on the Graph LMS book.
The ONLY fact that you must recall is that without interactivity, we can't track if a student us using a MicroSim. It is the job of the instructional designer to make sure that every microsim has at least one interactive event, even if it is just a check that the student use their mouse to hover over regions of an infographic MicroSim.
- Google Analytics
- Simulation Tracking
- xAPI
- Tracking Who-What-When
- Learning Record Store
- xAPI events to a LRS
- IEEE Learning Standards
- Total Learning Architecture
Chapter 12
Run the chapter-content-generator skill on @docs/chapters/12-accessibility-deployment-completion/index.md
The writing level is college students or business professionals.
Make the tone fun, and optimistic with a holistic view that knowing how to automate instructional design will make the world a better place. Feel free to add puns and jokes to lighten the tone.
Do not put leading spaces in the
Place special attention to the ways that p5.js adds information such as the describe() function that is required of all p5.js microsims for a good quality score. Note that the current MicroSim architecture strongly suggests putting controls below the drawingArea. Using ONLY mouse events to control an MicroSim can limit accessibility.